There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.

“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”

Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.

“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.

He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.

17

Brown Lake Test Area, Dreamland

It was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.

“The Shark flies the shark—gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.

Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.

In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.

Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.

The Shark that Turk Mako flew was the F–40 Tigershark II, the experimental aircraft owned by the Pentagon’s Technology Office, now being equipped with the Medusa control unit to work with the Sabre UAVs. It was the latest in a long line of experimental aircraft, a cutting-edge plane that would have looked right at home on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.

Technically, two previous aircraft had been called the Tigershark. The first was actually an informal name applied by the British to their versions of the P–40 Warhawk, after squadrons began painting sharks’ mouths on the nose. Fighting against the Japanese in China, Claire Lee Chenault’s Flying Tigers saw how good the paint looked and added teeth to their versions, helping to make the look famous.

Tigershark II’s direct namesake was the F–20, a lightweight, multirole aircraft developed by Northrop in the 1970s and early 1980s from the basic blueprint of the F–5E. It was incredibly nimble, capable of hitting Mach 2 and climbing to over 54,000 feet. It could take off in only 1,600 feet, a relatively short distance for a jet of that era, and the simplicity of its design made it easy to maintain—an important consideration for its intended target consumers, friendly American allies who might not have or want to spend the money for more expensive aircraft.

Though an excellent aircraft, the F–20 eventually succumbed to the realities of international weapons purchasing, where politics often overshadowed other considerations.

Like its predecessor, the new Tigershark was light, small, and fast. Very, very fast.

The airframe had essentially been built around the engine, a combination hypersonic pulse and ramjet that could take the sleek, needle-nosed plane to Mach 5. The engine also allowed it to operate around 135,000 feet. The wings came out in a triangular wedge, with faceted and angled fins on both sides.

The engine’s quad air scoop was located directly under the cabin area of the fuselage; rail guns were mounted on either side. The rail guns were directed energy weapons, firing small bursts of plasma at high speed. The bursts were roughly the equivalent of a 50-millimeter machine-gun bullet. Devastating to another aircraft, the weapon had several advantages over conventional machine guns, starting with the fact that its projectile, though as potent as missiles, were the size of 25mm bullets. Its effective range was just over twenty miles—well before the aircraft would be seen on radar.

The weapon did have some limitations. Only a dozen charges could be fired before it had to cool down and recycle, a process that took two minutes under ideal conditions. And with each firing, the gun literally tried to pull itself apart. Maintaining it in working order was, so far at least, very expensive.

Turk counted another negative to the weapon, though this was never mentioned by its builders. Great precision was needed to target a moving adversary, and the forces created as the weapon was fired made the Tigershark hard to control at all but top speed. These facts combined to dictate that the aircraft be flown entirely by the computer during the combat sequence. In other words, he had to hand the stick over to the silicon to take his shot.

He didn’t particularly like that. No computer was ever going to be as good as he was at flying. Ever.

Turk had joined the Air Force to fly. He was good at it—very good, he liked to think. He’d flown everything the service had given him—from F–16s to Flighthawks. In his not too humble opinion, he was the best. It irked him to give up the stick, even if he wasn’t literally standing back out of the way. But that was the way it was.

In a very real sense, he knew he was lucky to have a job where his seat was actually in a cockpit. All of the good young jocks were headed toward UAV programs now, a dramatic switch from just a few years ago. Unmanned planes were the Air Force’s future.

That sucked. There was nothing like the smell of rapidly evaporating jet fuel to get you moving in the morning, he thought. He took one last whiff and plugged up, snugging the Tigershark’s cockpit.

Time to rock and roll.

“Control to Tiger One, Tiger One, you read?” prompted the control tower.

“Copy, Control, strong read.”

“Status?”

Part of Turk wanted to give a real wise guy answer—maybe something like, “I feel like I gotta pee.” But the flight control computer at Dreamland that was talking to him had no sense of humor. In fact, the only thing in the universe that had less of a sense of humor was the flight control computer’s human boss, Major Samantha “Killjoy” Combs, who had promised to write him up if he goofed on the computer again. His joking around had frozen the system, grounding flights for over two hours.

Or so she claimed.

“Write me up?” he’d laughed. “I just discovered a flaw in your stupid computer program.”

“You caused two flight ranges to shut down.”

“Better we found the problem now rather than in battle,” said Turk.

“Captain.”

“Hey, make yourself happy. What are you gonna do, give me a parking ticket?”

Twenty minutes later his boss, Breanna Stockard, had called from D.C., telling him that if the three-star general commanding Dreamland complained about him again, he was going to be reassigned to clean toilets in the coldest part of Alaska.

So Turk was very straight today when dealing with the computer controller.

“Status is green,” said the pilot. “Awaiting clearance to take off.”

“Tiger One you are cleared to proceed on the filed flight plan. You are cleared for takeoff.”